Many organizations have a need to notify entities (e.g., individuals or companies) of events relating to that organization. These organizations may publish the events and allow the entities to access the published information on their own initiative. For example, if the organization is an airline, it may have a need to notify passengers who are booked on a flight of changes to the flight's schedule. These organizations can publish their events in various ways. For example, many airlines have telephone numbers or web sites through which the current status of each flight can be obtained. A passenger can call the number or visit the web site to determine whether their flight's schedule has been changed. Some organizations may allow entities to be notified in a more active manner by sending a notification directly to the entity. For example, when an airline has changed a flight's schedule, its computer systems may automatically place a call or send an electronic mail message to all the passengers who are booked on the flight informing them of the change.
It can be very expensive and time-consuming for an organization to develop or purchase the necessary software and hardware to send effective event notifications. As a result, an application service provider (“ASP”) system has been developed to assist an organization in sending its event notifications. Because of economies of scale, such an ASP system may be able to dispatch event notifications in a less expensive and more efficient manner than can be done by an individual organization. Such an ASP system may connect to the computer systems of many organizations (e.g., via the Internet) and receive requests to send an event notification to a designated entity on behalf of an organization. Upon receiving a request from an organization, the ASP system may queue the request. Periodically, the ASP system retrieves the requests from the queue and, for each request, notifies the designated entity of the event.
Oftentimes, the notification of an event that is sent to an entity will result in the entity contacting the organization. For example, if a person is notified that their flight has been canceled, then that person may call the airline to reschedule. When a large number of event notifications are sent by the ASP system on behalf of an organization, the organization may not be able to effectively handle all the resulting return contacts by the entities that received the event notifications. It would be desirable to have an ASP system that would send event notifications in a way that the requesting organization is not overwhelmed with return contacts.